China has blocked YouTube. They have not offered any explanation as to why but its suspected that the main reason is becasue there’s suspicious videos of Tibetans being beaten by the Chinese authorities that they believe to be fake. China has a history of banning media that delivers messages that are politicaly unacceptable.
This is not the first time that it’s happened either. Apparently it was banned for about 14 days in 2007 during a meeting in Beijing of the communist party congress.
The reason why this is a big deal is China, the country with the largest proportion of interent users, can take action like this so easily without proper explanation and the reasoning behind its actions. As you can imagine lobbying human rights groups for ‘freedom of expression’ are going berserk. If they restrict access due to these recent videos then what’s next? There’s probably a wealth of other unsuitable videos that could also lead to the restriction of the video service, as well as a number of other platforms such as images on Flickr that carry politically unacceptable messages concerning China.
This case goes to prove that Google is not ‘all powerful’ partuclary in the eastern and middle eastern worlds. Several other countries are also said to have banned Youtube . It is still banned in Turkey now by by the countries largest ISP for insults on ‘Turkishness’ in a spate of abusive videos sent between Greek and Turkish users.
I wonder how much ad reveune this little ban is costing Google?
Lets see what happens…
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